Mois : mars 2018

Instrumental’s flagship product, TalentAI, monitors billions of data points each day from sources such as Spotify and other socials to deliver trend intelligence on emerging artists to the A&R and talent spotting teams in music labels, publishers, promoters and marketers.

The new funding will see Instrumental significantly increase their investment in machine learning for ‘faster identification of high potential, emerging artists’.

Over the last 10 years, the online proliferation of cultural content has increased the importance of not only of this content, but also of the platforms that make it accessible. Intermediaries, through their influence and dominance, have become the main gateway to free online content. This clear finding must form part of the proposal for a copyright directive.

Naturally, the text must be adapted to reflect digital progress, but this should not be to the detriment of the creative sector and the cultural industry. Parliament must send an unambiguous message by proposing a clear and balanced text.

As part of our ongoing negotiations, compromises on copyright exceptions in the digital market are about to come to fruition, particularly on educational content.

Promoting catalog on streaming is a dramatically different proposition than pushing physical product, according to a veteran distribution executive. “Format changes have always given catalog a bump,” the executive says. “But what’s different now is the idea of lifetime value — before, you were trying to get people to buy something once, but now you’re trying to get people to keep coming back.”

Key to that repeat business is discovery, which is generally discussed in terms of new music but is just as relevant for catalog. “When a song or an artist is featured on, say, [former] President Obama’s Spotify playlist, or in film or TV or in a commercial, it can lead to a big boost in streaming numbers,” says another major-label executive. “For example, [the N.W.A biopic] ‘Straight Outta Compton’ led thousands of people to discover N.W.A and Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s older cuts.”

Booking gigs without putting any effort into it? How absurd! And yet, I’ve had to book very few of my own gigs in the last seven years (if any), and I’ve still had more than my fair share of well-paying and creatively fulfilling gigs. So, I’m here to tell you that it is possible. I’m not going to promise you, however, that there isn’t some legwork involved in getting to that point. But once the right pieces are in place, much of it can happen on autopilot. So, here are the steps you’ll need to take if you don’t want

Post-revelation, my entire mentality shifted, and the idea of being an artist morphed into being a creative entrepreneur. I realized no one was going to care about my music and my world as much as I did, and this freedom from others’ expectations opened up my perspective of what was possible as an initially self-funding independent artist. I began building up areas of my career, block by block.

Deezer, as a streaming service, needs to pay royalties to music providers (record companies that make their music available on Deezer) as well as publishers and copyright collective management organisations so that the music you listen to gets payed at the right price according to the number of times it has been streamed. We also need to generate and send them financial and statistics reports to allow them to pay their own right owners (performers, song writers) accordingly. Reports are also sent to various other partners (charts companies for example).

Daniel Ek wants Spotify to flatten the ‘gatekeepers’ of the traditional music business.

In doing so, he says, the platform will grossly improve the amount of money that a great swathe of artists are making from their craft.

Ek offered some revolutionary patter at Spotify’s Investor Day in New York earlier this month, where he boldly informed his audience that his service “doesn’t believe in gatekeepers” – before laying down a thrilling, scene-stealing proclamation: “Our mission is to enable one million artists to live off their work.”

This sounds absolutely brilliant, of course.

Especially when you consider what’s been said many times about those dastardly music biz ‘gatekeepers’ – that they have constructed such an elaborate maze of an industry, only the exclusive ‘one percent’ can ever hope to make the big bucks.